Flash Paranormal Fiction

We were not automatons, no matter how much they wanted us to be. Well, I wasn’t, anyway.

We all wore the same clothes, we all had the same coloured hair and eyes, we all had similar facial features. We were Hitler’s chosen-race army of the future.

Marching: monotonous, dreary, thudding footsteps. Synchronised, like the seconds ticking, ticking, ticking away. A countdown. To what, I don’t know. But my blood is gurgling, burbling, bubbling.

My exterior is a mask of concentrated calm, hiding the toxic fumes waiting to pour out. I sneak glances out of my periphery, seeing an endless sea of blue, with flashes of red and gold. I am sick of these endless marching exercises. Sick to my gut. Every day, mindless marching, dribble injected into our brains, subconscious attempts to make us conform.

It has been six years, I think, since they stole me away in the night. Six years since the world changed. Or, did I? One’s view, after all, is their take on the world. Six years since I last read a book. Too long, in any case.

A whistle blows. End of exercise. I trudge back to my quarters, ready to be mindlessly educated for two hours before the evening exercise commences.

No talking is tolerated. No communication of any kind. Even eye-contact. I don’t know how they know if we make eye-contact, but they know. No one’s dared to try, anyway.

We remain in the same formation all the way until we enter the inner courtyard, where groups break off to their respective ways.

Two hours in front of a screen is mind-numbingly dull. I can’t even remember what I saw. We exit our room, the ten of us, and get a chance to go to the toilet, and wash our face and hands. Ten identical cubicles opposite ten identical sinks. No mirrors. I have only ever used the one second from the left, the next to closest to the door. We exit in single file, one after another, heads down.

 I have a plan, not to escape, at least, not physically, but to free my mind. Ease my conscience, if you will. I just need to see if it will work.

A whistle blows just as the last in our group exits. We belong to each other, but I have no idea who they are, and I certainly couldn’t pick any of them out of a line. Truth be told, I don’t know what I look like. The only people I belong to – I don’t know who they are or what they look like.

Okay, so I give myself one-hundred steps once we start marching, until I will carry out my plan. I don’t care if it gets me killed, or beaten to a pulp. I don’t know what the punishments are in this place, but I’m not afraid to incur them. I just need to break the conformity. We weren’t made to be the same. It’s just not right!

We assemble into formation, waiting for the whistle. It goes off. One-hundred, ninety-nine. I have to give us all time to get into the rhythm, the dull, loud beat of homogeneity. A face appears, for no reason, in my mind. My mother. She was a poet, and I think she instilled in me a love for words, a need for reading. I haven’t read anything for so long. Seventy-three, seventy-two.

My father’s face follows hers, my train of thoughts turned to the family I used to have. It’s hard to believe they ever existed. At any rate, he is a memory that I haven’t looked at for so long that it physically aches. My heart thumps painfully. Thirty-seven, thirty-six.

Here I am distracting myself! Come on, concentrate. And before I know it: ten, nine, you can do it, six, five, gather my willpower, two, one.

I stop, dead still in my tracks. I was hoping to disrupt the flow, be bumped into by a hundred others behind me. But we’ve all stopped, all at the same time. Maybe I misheard a whistle through the pounding of my heart. I turn my head, craning my neck trying to see past the…past the, past the other turned heads and craned necks. I look behind me in bewilderment, and see the slightly delayed reaction of every one else turn their heads with the same wild momentum that I just had.

I reach my hand up, testing a wave, uncertain about what was happening. Sure enough, every single person there reached their hands up and tested a wave. In complete uniformity, we had rebelled.

Shafts of light bled through the gaps in the blind; the sunlight illuminated everything in its path. Including the face of a girl who was not there. James jumped out of his seat and tripped on the legs of his chair, crashing into the floor in a landslide.

Mr. Anderson, get up, sit down and answer the question.” Ms. Dempsey scolded him from the front of the class, and fire burned in James’ cheeks as the titters of his classmates grew more vocal.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, took his seat again, and kept his gaze firmly fixed on the dark knots in his hardwood desk.

What was that? He thought. The heat must be getting to him. There was nothing there, nothing but the blackboard and empty space.

There had been no girl.

Had there?

The tingling sensation began in the base of his neck, snowballing through his synapses. The feeling of being watched.  James glimpsed up from beneath his lashes, watching his classmates reactions. Not one of them was watching him.

But she was.

He always heard that ghostly encounters resulted in chills. He didn’t feel chills.

He felt nauseous.

“Excuse me, Ms. Dempsey, may I be excused?” 

“Mr. Anderson, there are only twenty minutes left. Can’t it wait?”

James gulped and felt his chest constrict like an anaconda had wrapped itself around his oesophagus. His answer came out dry and raspy, like sandpaper. “No, I don’t think it can.”

James grabbed his backpack and raced out the door—ignoring Ms. Dempsey’s high-pitched shrieks demanding he return—ran down the long, abandoned corridor, threw open the double doors and jumped into his nearby car. Once the door closed, he slammed his head against the steering wheel and let himself take a long, deep breath.

“What just happened?” James groaned, squeezing his eyes shut, red spots swimming under his eyelids.

“You can see me?” James, startled, fell back against the driver’s seat and began to hyperventilate. His eyes darted to the rear-view mirror, and he relaxed when he saw nothing. “Hello?”

James whipped his head to the left, and there she was. She was about his age, with wide, almond-shaped green eyes, a peaches-and-cream complexion and her dark brown hair pulled back into a knot at the back of her head. She looked like any other girl. Other the fact that she was transparent when the sun shone through her and she wore clothes that would have been the height of fashion in the 1840s.

“I think I’m having a manic episode.” James said, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again, hoping this was all some weird, extremely unfunny, dream.

“Nope, I’m here,” she smiled. It was a pretty smile. “In the flesh.”

“Is that a joke?” his voice cracked, and he cleared his throat but didn’t repeat the statement. Her laugh tinkled like a bell that rang long ago in the past. It sounded distant. Like a memory lingering on.

“You’re cute,” she smiled.

“Um…thank you?” James jerked a hand through his hair and lay back against the seat again, relaxing his shoulders.

“Why can you see me?” she asked, worrying her bottom lip, searching for answers with her eyes as well as her words.

“I don’t know,” James rubbed his tired eyes, “This has never happened before. I just looked up and you were there. This is bizarre. I feel like I’m gonna wake up at any moment from this nightmare.”

“So I’m a monster?” James immediately regretted his words.

“No…no…you’re beautiful.”

Her smile was brighter than the sun itself.

“This is too weird.” He sighed. Her smile fell, but she recovered quickly.

“I think it’s nice.”

“You do?”

“Yes. After so many years of being alone, just watching all of you passing by—breathing, laughing, living—it’s nice to have someone to talk back. For someone to finally hear what I have to say.”

“And what do you have to say?”

“I need someone to know how I died.”

                                                                                                *

“It was early in the fall. I was walking through the orchard with my friend, Natalie, and she was telling me about how Jackson Gilmore was in the process of courting her. She was so excited,” she giggled. “She went home, and I walked along the path in the Orchard, watching the colours on the leaves bleed together, from red to gold. I always loved that time of year. I heard the hunting horn faintly blowing with the breeze, but thought nothing of it. I wish I had.” Her face fell, and the ghosts of tears filled her eyes as she shimmered in the sunlight. “I was nearing the river when I felt it. You never can describe being shot, but I guess as the sharp metal broke through me, It felt like I had shattered.”

“You were shot? That’s how you died?”

“No, It was the accident that  led to it. I stumbled forward, clutching my side, praying that I would see tomorrow, be courted, grow old, and once more see the colours bleed on the leaves and not just through my dress. There was a log, I tripped over it.

I didn’t notice the cliff behind it.”

“Oh, god.”

“My heart had always been weak; it gave out during the fall, and my body was swept away with the river.”

“I’m so sorry….”

“Kate,” she smiled. “My name is Kate.”

“I’m so sorry, Kate. At least now someone, somewhere, knows your story.”

She smiled a half-smile, “I’m glad it’s you. I never realised how much I would miss.”

“Like what?”

James didn’t think a ghost could blush, but he was sure Kate had. “My first kiss.”

James didn’t know why, but he grabbed her hand, was shocked to realise he could grasp it, and stared her in the eye. Her eyes widened as he leaned in further. Their lips met. James tingled and saw a bright light.

From a distance, he heard her whisper, thank you.

And then she was gone.

I stare uncomprehendingly at the body lying on the icy, wet pavement. She looks just like me, but she can’t really be me. She can’t! It’s not possible. That can’t be blood seeping from her chest, staining the white tank top a bright, vivid red. It’s the only color that stands out, stark against everything else that seems to be in black and white. It’s the only color I can see at all.

I had worn that tank top underneath a black cardigan, that short jeans skirt and those platform shoes that gave me an extra boost of height.  I had those long, wavy strawberry blonde tresses matted with blood and splayed out all around my body.

No, no, no! I’m too young to be dead! I still have to graduate, go on to college, study art design, fall in love. My life hasn’t even begun yet! What’s even worse, my parents and older brother will never get over this.

I was so stupid! I never should have snuck out of the house to go to that ridiculous club with my friends–who all ditched me to leave with guys anyway. It was the hugest mistake I’ve ever made, even bigger than the time I crashed Dad’s car.

And I can never take it back. I can never fix it. This harsh reality sinks in, filling my veins with ice.

My scream of rage and anguish echoes all around me in this dark alley. It’s the only thing that sounds real, normal. A wave of power seems to erupt from deep within me, shaking everything. Windows rattle. Flowerpots fall from fire escape ledges, crashing to the ground and shattering on impact. A nearby dog whines and yelps, then scampers away.  Somehow, impossibly, I’ve triggered a major chain reaction in the world I’ve left behind. How can I still affect that world? I have no idea, but I fall silent and hold up my ghostly hand to examine it. A grim smile of triumph curves my lips upward.

“What the hell?”

His voice and the sound of running catches my attention, but it’s muted, muffled. Not like the sharp, crisp click against the pavement that it would be to the ears of anyone still living. The man who did this to me is running away. In the distance, a police siren wails. Is that what he’s running from, too? Coward! I narrow my gaze and stare after him for a moment. He’s not getting away. Not on my watch.

I will hunt you down and make you pay. I will haunt you until you are driven insane with remorse for what you’ve done.

His tiny apartment is in a run-down area of town. Everything’s dingy and in such disrepair that there are multiple holes in the walls and wallpaper peeling everywhere.  The furniture is sparse, and the place is filthy. I’m suddenly glad my senses are dulled; it would probably smell horrendous in here.

“All right. Who are you?” I glance around, searching for anything that can tell me about the guy.  The only thing I see is a lone photograph on an end table. Two young boys, their arms around each other with carefree smiles and the light of hope in their eyes, stood by a lake, dripping wet from a swim. There’s something familiar about them, but I can’t place why.

Then I see my purse lying on the floor, its contents dumped carelessly on the coffee table. “You did this just to get my purse?” Rage wells up inside me again. “You could have just stolen it. You didn’t have to kill me too, you know!” Too bad he can’t hear me.

He’s in the shower. I can, just barely, hear the streaming of water. I head for the bathroom to confront him. He thinks that washing my blood away will keep anyone else from finding out it was him?  Not a chance.  The water turns off, and I wait just long enough to be sure he’s decent before trying that thing I did earlier in the alley. I still don’t know how I can do that, but I’m glad it works. I manage to make the door burst open.

He jumps in surprise and stares my way, his mouth open and eyes wide. I doubt he can actually see me.  “Who’s there?” His shifty eyes dart all around, and he balls his hands into fists as he tries not to freak out when he doesn’t see anything.

The mirror is fogged with steam from the shower, so  I use my index finger to write my name on the glass.

Sophie.

 You’re not going to forget me. Ever.

At first, there’s a look of panic in his eyes, but he hardens his expression. “Well, Sophie. Get out of my place,” he says. “You’re done.” Then he calls me a very unflattering name.

That’s the last straw. My temper explodes, and along with it, the mirror. It shatters, making him fling himself back to avoid the shards of glass flying at him. “Temper, temper,” he taunts. I want to wipe that smirk off his face as he stalks back out to the living room.

I have my work cut out for me, clearly.

He plops onto his ratty couch and rifles through my belongings. He stops cold when he finds two pictures in my wallet. “Stay away from my stuff!” I protest, drawing closer. Then I see the pictures. One of them is of me, my brother, and Mom and Dad. The other is the same one this guy has.

It’s him and my dad as kids. This is the junkie brother my dad told me about.

His face crumples as he realizes who I am. “Oh, God! What’ve I done?” Seeing him sitting on the couch sobbing, utterly broken, melts the ice around my heart enough for me to begin to forgive. I’m ready now.  A bright light washes over me, and I move on from my unfinished life.

I want your stories.

I know you have them. You learned them from an older cousin when you were staying overnight at your grandmother’s house, and she was trying to scare you with talk of ghost children and spirits locked in cigar boxes and closets. You learned them sitting around a campfire one night in March, and they made you scared of the heavy footsteps of the armadillos and snapping of tree branches in the wind.

Or maybe you’ ve lived them. You saw a misplaced shadow or felt a tug on a blanket when you were sleeping in a hotel bedroom. You saw someone, a long time ago. Then you saw them again, recently, and it was as if they hadn’t aged a day. Or maybe you  feel yourself turning into some other, different, supercharged but fragile version of yourself.

You have stories inspired by stories. You  stayed up too late  watching Black Swan. You read about half-human or once-human boys and girls and have wanted to be their friend or fight alongside them or be in endless love with them.

It doesn’t matter how you got them. I want them. Everybody wants them. Give them up. Give them life. Submissions.

I was supposed to be the fearless one. Older and bigger than the others, one of the cool kids, I guess you’d say. I was supposed to be fearless, but in my twelve-year-old mind the stakes were high this time. We weren’t good kids. We’d been responsible for some light vandalism, petty theft, just general delinquent behavior, but a stunt like this could mean real trouble.

On our block was one of those houses that seemed to have new occupants every few months, like clockwork. Always mysterious, antisocial, shut-in types. The rumor was that the house was cursed, probably even haunted. That something was scaring everyone away. Stories had been circulating for years that someone had died there: an old man had suffered a slow, cancerous death, a young mother had killed her baby then hung herself in a closet, that sort of thing. Typical lurid urban legend stuff. The adults never confirmed or denied these stories, but seemed to agree that there was something a little off about that house. Ghosts or bad vibes or something.

Davie got closer than any of us to substantiating the rumors of strange goings-on there. He lived across the street, and swore he’d been awoken one night a few months back by flashing lights. From his bedroom window he saw paramedics escorting a man out of the house and into the back of an ambulance. He was around our dads’ age, Davie said, and wasn’t so sick that he couldn’t walk on his own. Then the ambulance calmly departed. Later that night a cop showed up, knocked on the front door, peered into the living room window next to the door, then also calmly departed. Soon the house was vacant again. Not even a for sale or rent sign out front. Just vacant.

Sometime later, Fat Mike, on a dare, shimmied over the fence behind the pecan tree on the house’s garage side and into the back yard. He saw a small side door to the garage, jiggled the knob, and noted that it wasn’t locked. He hadn’t gone any further, though. I was supposed to be the fearless one, not Fat Mike. So we all gathered there one dreary, wintery Saturday morning, ready to get to the bottom of all the haunted house rumors. And as the oldest and coolest and most fearless, I took the lead.

I hopped the fence and entered the garage easily enough, the others right behind. It was empty except for a few paint cans and a weathered aluminum trash bin. I tested the door that led into the kitchen. Also unlocked. I entered, trying not to let my tentativeness show. The kitchen was empty. Nothing noteworthy; it looked just like our kitchens at home. We then proceeded into the living room. Also empty. The whole place smelled a little musty, but was overall quite tidy. I’m not sure what we expected to find inside (some kind of Satanic altar?), but the whole scene was fairly ordinary.
Then we saw the staircase. The final frontier in our little delinquent adventure. I started up, the stairs creaking slightly with each step, while the others watched on from below. I’d made it about two-thirds of the way up when I saw that the house wasn’t entirely empty.  As I continued my climb, the wooden railings of a baby crib crept into my line of sight. I froze momentarily, reminded myself that all eyes were on me, then proceeded.
When I got to the top I saw before me a fully-furnished child’s room. My body shuddered and my pulse quickened. Pink walls, the aforementioned crib, changing table, rocking chair, playfully stenciled toy box. Strewn across the floor were numerous toys: alphabet blocks, stuffed animals, a multi-colored xylophone. As unnerving as the whole scene was, I forged ahead, tip-toeing through the toy hazard before me toward the crib, my heart pounding, my eyes tearing up slightly.

Inside the crib I saw a small, blanketed bundle. Startled, I took a step back, tripped over a plastic ukulele, and tumbled to the carpeted floor. Then I saw what was beneath the crib. Forming atop the beige carpet was an inky red puddle, and the underside of the crib’s mattress just below the blanketed bundle was soaked; so much so that it was actively dripping, sending circular ripples to the puddle’s outer edges. I was supposed to be the fearless one, but I quickly rose and ran. The others stood momentarily dumbstruck as I barreled down the stairs and whizzed past them. But soon enough they were right behind.

Before we went our separate ways, we assembled outside and I tried to explain: I saw a dead baby. Or a dead something. There was blood everywhere. Fat Mike interrupted and called bullshit. Davie looked petrified. The others didn’t know how to act. Eventually, though, we parted in stony silence.
The next day Davie called. In a quavering voice he said he’d called the police that night, told them they needed to check out the vacant house, that it might not be vacant. They told him kid, go bother someone else before we come find you and lock you up. But then later that night Davie claimed a cop showed up at the house and knocked on the door. No answer, of course. So the cop peered through the living room window next to the door. He then gave it a slight tug. It opened. He crawled inside and turned on his flashlight. Davie watched the beam of light move through the house, room by room, until the cop made it up the stairs and into the room at the top. The beam of light moved from one end of the room to the other without hesitation. The cop then descended the stairs, crawled out the window, closed it behind him, and calmly departed.

I called bullshit. Then Davie said, I’ve seen it too. It’s not dead yet.

His shadow moves across the empty void. It carries nothing but the impressions of a body: crooked nose, curly hair, lips that laughed and swore too much. Once upon a time, there was flesh joined to the shadow’s shape – muscles that stretched and strained with the boy’s every movement – but now it wanders the Plain alone.

If the shadow had a nose, the Plain would probably smell of dust and decay. If the shadow had a tongue, the Plain would likely taste of burnt-out dreams and charred chalky hope. As it happens, the shadow has neither of these senses, and so the Plain to him is just a strange dead vacuum.

The shadow does not remember how he arrived on the Plain, but he remembers events leading up to the moment when soul was ripped from skin. He remembers a girl lying back on the grass, her nose buried in the bright pollen of a dandelion. He remembers the rubber grip of the bike’s handlebars under his palms, and the rush of adrenaline that comes with a perfectly-executed trick and the pretty eyes that watched it. He remembers flight – arms stretched to the sky, feet kicking at empty blue air. He remembers flickering half-dreams of lights and white walls and a rain of dandelion chains…

And then he was standing on the Plain, staring at nothing, smelling and tasting nothing, and his body was gone.

It took minutes hours years before the shadow formed some semblance of a plan: he needed his body back.

This is how he began his hike across the void, searching the sense-less Plain for the flesh that went with his soul.

For minutes hours years, the nothingness aches and throbs around him, until a lightning-strike of white splits open the black sky. The shadow watches with sightless eyes as the light splinters the world into a thousand spiderwebbed slivers, as a sound beyond sound cracks open the Plain –

And the shadow listens to the noiseless words that filters through the cracks – words that somehow translate to “not going to make it” and “I’m sorry nothing we can do” and “Jacob, Jacob, baby” and –

He-sees-but-doesn’t-see the white walls and the blinding linoleum tiles and the ropy arteries of IVs and –

He smells-but-doesn’t-smell the raw stinging antiseptic and the latex gloves and the salt tang of tears that stream from a girl with dandelions in her hair and –

Something hurtles toward him, a rocket, a grenade, and as it collides with his fleshless form he is suddenly aware of pain. After minutes hours years of nothing, the pain is like ecstasy.

The shadow gives a voiceless cry and falls like an uprooted tree while the Plain crumbles around him. In an instant, the void is replaced by a universe of glittering light, and the shadow feels free and whole in a way that he hasn’t felt since the bike launched him into the sky like a baby bird. He laughs as he floats up into a world of peace and brilliance.

And somewhere in an emergency room, in another world, the body’s heart stops beating.